Vatican Hack 2018 - Les gagnants

The winners of the first-ever hackathon at The Vatican, VHacks, organized by OPTIC, and students from Harvard and MIT, were announced on March 11th, 2018.

The top 3 teams for each theme: Social Inclusion, Interfaith Dialogue, and Migrants & Refugees, were:

Social Inclusion

Winner: Co.unity

Co-Unity builds stronger ties with the homeless in each community by creating a local crowdfunded job board to enrich vocational experiences and develop trust.

Alan Liu

Margaret Thomann

Marcin Wisniowski

Tiffany Chen

Adam Hirst

Runner-Up: Zelixa

Zelixa is a Microsoft Hololens app that helps dyslexic people train themselves to read better over time. It uses the technique of focus points, typefaces, and colors, to help those with dyslexia focus on the correct portions of words.

Pranav Gulati

Robert Ihnatisin

Lorenzo Bellucci

Carra Wu

Selynna Sun

Third Place: Xperience

Xperience brings together people who are often excluded from experiencing the world (due to some form of disability), and people who are willing to share their experiences. Individuals who sign up as “guides” on the app provide real-time, live tours of their local locations via stream to those viewing through the app.

Myra Deng

Perttu Lähteenlahti

Johannes Bernhard Goslar

Vivian Shen

Elmar van Rijnswou

Interfaith Dialogue

Winner: Duo Collegare

Duo Collegare provides a platform to connect organizations and volunteers to inspire action, rather than just dialogue. From homelessness to natural disasters to mental health, we enable people to connect with one another, regardless of religious affiliation.

Francis Duah

Alexander (Sasha) Ivanov

Sharon Wang

Arkady (Eric) Eidelberg

Raza Qazi

**Duo Collegare was also the winner of the La Croix Prize

Runner-Up: Faithstrings

Faithstrings is a web virtual reality application integrated with a moderated interfaith dialog community that allow people to enter and experience the world of various religions. The immersive experience provided by VR and extended dialogue will evoke fascinating empathy as well as encourage deeper understanding regardless of geographical distances and different faiths

Vy Bui

Emma Flanagan

LeQuan Clinton

Van Lam

Michael Monaghan

** Also the winner of the Best Use of Salesforce Technologies Award

Third Place: pluralize

Pluralize is a Chrome extension and accompanying analytics platform that helps people become aware of the religions most prevalent in their social vicinity and suggest ways to help them learn about other faiths.

Erica Yarmol-Matusiak

Miruna Tecusanu

William Long

Chak Man Andrew Yip

Nicole Valencia

Migrants & Refugees

Winner: Credit/Ability

Credit/Ability is a "credibility" scoring application that provides a refugee a way to collate their history and demonstrate their reliability in employment leasing to gain easier access to services like housing.

Jake Glass

Roisin McLaughlin

Yanchen Wang

Lucy Obus

Rushika Shekar

Runner-Up: Sajal

Sajal is a healthcare application that gives verified doctors the ability to scan unique QR codes generated for and connected to migrants and refugees in order to bring up patients' medical history and any chronic illnesses or allergies they are known to have.

Jessy Lin

Samuel Sungil Kim

Juliet Wanyiri

Neil Gokhlay

Claire Traweek

Third Place: Vinculum

Every year, tens of thousands of migrants and refugees lose one another in the process of relocation: Vinculum is a web-app that leverages machine learning to reunite loved ones through the upload of a single photo and advanced face-recognition technology.